“Here Betsy bobs in the ice-rimmed water with several other swimmers, lined up like racers at the edge of a pool…”

In keeping with our “Maps & Legends” seasonal theme, BROAD STREET presents the next dreamy collaboration between poet Judith Serin and artist Masami Inoue. Serin’s actual dreams point to reality in some uncharted territory that Inoue’s watercolors begin to map.

Dream Ocean

Because I’m sick and Herbert is away, I decide to stay at my friend Betsy’s, who lives in the dream at the top of the dirt and gravel road of my childhood home in New Jersey. I’m resting, drowsy and feverish, when she hears it has snowed at Ocean Beach and goes to swim there. I rouse myself to watch her. I drive over the sand to the southern end through a light layer of snow. Despite the snow it really is San Francisco’s Ocean Beach in this dream, not the Atlantic-like, though west-facing, beach I walked to the night before with my father, who has been visiting my dreams lately. Often I follow streets through San Francisco’s Richmond district to a long stretch of sand and a flat ocean: this western version of the New Jersey shore a constant in my dream geography. Here Betsy bobs in the ice-rimmed water with several other swimmers, lined up like racers at the edge of a pool. She wears a bright pink swimsuit and a white rubber swim cap. She says the ocean tastes like ice water.

The Legend of the Series and Its Creators

The “Dream Geographies” series began in summer 2016 and is now reprising in winter 2017–a collaboration between poet Judith Serin and visual artist Masami Inoue, who together are charting the vast unknowns toward which our unconscious dreaming point us. Further installments will come weekly through February.

Judith Serin is the author of the poetry collection Hiding in the World, and her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Ohio Journal, Writer’s Forum, Nebraska Review, Colorado State Review, Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge, and When Last on the Mountain. She presents these pieces with gratitude to Betsy Davids.

Masami Inoue, who also works under the name Masa, is a Japanese-American artist who has lived on both coasts of the United States. Most recently she moved from the Bay Area, where she and Serin began their collaboration, back to the East Coast. She creates both digitally and traditionally, focusing on watercolor as her medium. One of her paintings was featured in print in the “Maps & Legends” issue of Broad Street.